Kinetic Visions in the Bentson Mediatheque

Something Good – Negro Kiss by William Selig
A short, early silent moving image made in the late 1800s depicting Black love, Something Good – Negro Kiss is believed to depict the earliest on-screen African American kiss. The film features stage entertainers Saint Suttle, a theater composer, and Gertie Brown, a vaudeville actress. Something Good was deemed lost until its rediscovery in 2017, and was later preserved and restored by the University of Southern California’s HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive. 1898, US, film transferred to digital, 1 min.

All My Life by Bruce Baillie
A camera pans across a fence to capture a beautiful day, all in tune with the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald’s 1936 hit single “All My Life,” showcasing ways that the greatest pleasures of life can be grasped within the simplicity of a place. 1966, US, 16mm transferred to digital, 3 min., Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.

Living Inside by Sadie Benning
Benning documents personal moments with the use of a handheld black-and-white Fisher Price PixelVision toy camera. Using dialogue and close-ups as an intimate field of view, they explore moments of adolescent detachment and introspection, establishing their video diaries as prescient youth media ahead of its time. 1989, US, video transferred to digital, 5 min., Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.

7-7-94 For my babe by Paige Taul
In Taul’s words, 7-7-94 For my babe is “an attempt at connecting to the emotion and process of deciding how you want a loved one to perceive you and the performance of ‘cool.’” Based on a Polaroid the artist’s father sent to their mother before he was sent to federal prison, the image transcends its still form to become a moving record. 2020, US, 16mm transferred to digital, 3 min.

Show Me Other Places by Rajee Samarasinghe
A woman situated in the physical world assesses her alternate realities through various mediated realms. The limitations of visual representation are explored via film, video, monitors, and virtual planes, resulting in an ongoing questioning of image-making itself. 2021, Sri Lanka/US, digital, 12 min.

Vertical Roll by Joan Jonas
Blending the body with structural content, Vertical Roll intermeshes human form with the then-nascent technology of video. An electronic signal repeatedly disrupts space and reframes the image. Body becomes both site of performance and fragmented construct in Jonas’s looping visuals. 1972, US, video transferred to digital, 20 min., Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.

Mirror Products Catalog by Annapurna Kumar
Reimagining the lives of uncredited models from a catalogue of mirrors for sale from 1988, Mirror Products Catalog recasts the women as active creators of their own images. Clothing and hairstyles become updated to make them more comfortable while remaining true to the maximalist compositions and luscious colors of the original text. 2023, US, digital, 5 min.

William Selig (1864–1948) was a vaudeville performer and pioneer of the American motion picture industry. Born William Mikolaj Zeligowsky to immigrant parents living in Chicago, Selig trained as an upholsterer but later got his start in vaudeville, touring the Midwest as a magician’s assistant. In 1896, Selig created one of the first film production companies, Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago, which produced hundreds of early, widely distributed commercial moving pictures, including the first films starring early silent film actors Harold Lloyd, Colleen Moore, and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

Bruce Baillie (1931–2020) was an American experimental filmmaker. Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, he served in the US Navy during the Korean War and studied filmmaking at the London School of Film Technique, eventually settling in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s. He began making his first movie in 1960, and the following year launched Canyon Cinema, the historic artists’ film distributor and cooperative, alongside filmmaker Chick Strand. His film Castro Street (1966) was selected in 1992 for preservation in the US National Film Registry.

Sadie Benning (b. 1973, Madison, Wisconsin) began making videos at age 15, using a Fisher Price PixelVision toy camera. Benning’s early works were made in the privacy of their childhood bedroom, using handwritten text from diary entries to record thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity. Evoking in turns playful seduction and painful honesty, their floating, close-up camera functions as a witness to intimate revelations and as an accomplice in defining their evocative experimental form. Benning’s work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult—with all the honesty, humor, and desperation of a personality just coming into self-awareness, trapped and uneasy. Their more recent work moves beyond the PixelVision camera and into animation, film, and installation. Benning is a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow.

Paige Taul (b. 1996, Oakland, California) received a BA in studio art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and an MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work engages with and challenges assumptions of Black cultural expression and notions of belonging through experimental cinematography. As a part of her filmmaking practice, she tests the boundaries of identity and self-identification through autoethnography to approach notions of racial authenticity in veins such as religion, style, language, and other Black community-based experiences. Taul’s work has been exhibited at venues including UnionDocs, CROSSROADS at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, BlackStar Film Festival, and the Virginia Film Festival.

Rajee Samarasinghe (b. 1988, Colombo, Sri Lanka) is a filmmaker from Sri Lanka based in the United States. His work tackles contemporary sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of his own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices. Samarasinghe received a BFA from University of California, San Diego, and an MFA from CalArts. He is working on his debut feature, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, inspired by his childhood experiences during the Sri Lankan civil war. The project received a Sundance Documentary Fund grant in 2019, was invited to Berlinale Talents’ Doc Station, and was part of True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program in 2020. He was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2020. Samarasinghe’s work has been exhibited at the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center & Museum of Modern Art, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinema, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, REDCAT, SFFILM Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, CROSSROADS at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. He received the Tios Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Film House Award for visionary filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival.

Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York) received a BA in art history from Mount Holyoke College in 1958, studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and earned an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. She was awarded the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award in 1988, the Third Annual Polaroid Video Art Award in 1987, and was also the recipient of the Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Modern Art Prize at the Tokyo International Video Art Festival. Jonas has received grants for choreography, video, and the visual arts from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She was artist-in-residence at the TV Lab at WNET/Thirteen in New York and was selected for the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Artists-in-Berlin program. Jonas has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1998 and is professor emerita in the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology within the School of Architecture and Planning.

Annapurna Kumar is an internationally shown filmmaker and multimedia artist based in Southern California. She is a visiting lecturer for the University of California, Los Angeles, Design Media Arts program and is an adjunct faculty at Whittier College and Santa Ana College. Kumar’s work is about technologies: of image making and image capture, the similarities between human and computer vision, and the personal and political truths embedded in digital media. Recurring themes include video game language, the environmental tolls of material and digital existence, the phenomenology of the built environment versus the natural one, fertility and mortality, and the structures of memory. Combining scenes of intense planning with irreverent and improvisational digressions, her films are short and intense concentrated blasts of overlapping meanings, underpinned by a contemporary take on surface combining CGI, drawing, printing, and 16mm film. Kumar creates gallery work to accompany her films including ceramic and resin sculpture, large-format prints, artist’s books, and tapestries.

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